Scaling a business comes down to one thing: treating your people as people first, not employees. Brittany Driscoll, CEO and co-founder of Squeeze, shares how she used that principle (along with documented systems and values-driven culture) to build a nationwide massage franchise from the ground up. This episode is essential for any owner or founder trying to grow without losing the culture that made their business worth scaling.
This episode is part of the Business Strategy & Scaling Your Team series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“I don’t believe that’s possible. But we can make it easier for them to care.”
Episode highlights
The Lenscrafters moment that started this conversation
Lia walked into Lenscrafters to update her prescription and left without being helped, after a front-desk employee responded to every question with a flat, unhelpful answer. The takeaway was not a rant about one store. It was a prompt to ask a harder question: if this is happening at a big corporation with training budgets and HR departments, what is happening at the small businesses, med spas, optical shops, and hospitality venues where owners are already stretched thin?
The core problem is not that employees are bad people. It is that the conditions for caring were never set up. Low hourly pay, no visible career path, no feedback loop, no recognition. People do the bare minimum and no one says anything until it has been going on for months.
Expectations belong in onboarding, not in the correction conversation
The first tool is expectation setting, and it needs to start before things go wrong, ideally before the person is even hired. If you own a med spa in a market with fifty other med spas, your differentiator is not your equipment. It is how the person at the front desk makes a client feel when they walk in. That is a hiring criterion and an onboarding topic, not a performance review topic.
When team members are left to figure out the vibe themselves, they build habits. By the time an owner says something, there is a laundry list to address and the employee feels blindsided. Setting the standard at the start, what friendly looks like, what a good customer interaction sounds like, what response time is expected, means the team member knows what they signed up for. It also means recognition later actually lands, because the employee knows what they did well.
Follow-up without chasing everyone down
The second tool is follow-up, and the biggest objection Lia hears is “I do not have time to chase every little thing.” That is exactly the point. The goal is not for the owner to chase. The goal is to build a mechanism so the team member is reporting proactively.
Lia points to her free Snippets tool (available at liagarvin.com/snippets) as one way to do this. Every week, team members report on what they got done, where they are stuck, and what their priorities are for next week. Applied to customer service, that might look like a team member reviewing their own survey scores and reporting on them, or tracking sales closed, or media placements, or budget to actuals. The owner is not hunting down the information. The team member owns it.
When someone is consistently missing the mark, that proactive reporting creates a natural opening for a real conversation, not a surprise intervention.
What to do when the attitude is “I can’t do anything about it”
Some team members will shrug. Lia is direct: do not accept the shrug as a final answer. Ask them to come back next week with a plan. Then think through what levers actually exist. More flexibility, a half day, a small raise, more ownership over a project, the ability to work from home. It does not have to be a big incentive. It has to be something.
If there is genuinely nothing to offer and the person still does not care, then the owner needs to assess honestly: how hard would it be to replace this person? That is a real business question, not a threat. Owners who are constantly building an attractive position, paying fairly, creating a good environment, have more options when someone is not meeting the standard.
Recognition is one of the most underused culture tools
The third tool is recognition, and Lia argues it is more powerful than most owners realize, especially right now when raising wages across the board is not always possible. People come to work for two reasons: to get paid and to feel valued. When compensation cannot move, recognition fills a gap.
This does not mean pizza parties. It means catching someone doing something right and making it visible. A manager who tells the team “Joe got great feedback this week, I wanted everyone to hear it” creates a signal about what behavior is worth repeating. Over time, that signal shapes culture.
The sequence that actually works
Lia closes by naming the order that matters: set expectations first, build follow-up into the workflow, name the consequences of not meeting goals, then layer recognition on top. Recognition without expectations is noise. People do not know what they did well or whether it mattered. But once the standard is clear and the follow-up is built in, recognition becomes the thing that pulls the whole system forward and makes it easier for people to care.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 222: What investing in your team could cost you (or earn you). Waiting too long to address a team problem does not make it go away. Lia walks through two real client stories, one that ended in a $250,000 loss and one that produced a record $1M revenue quarter, to show how the timing of your action determines the outcome. This episode is essential for any business owner who suspects a problem but keeps putting off the conversation.
- Ep 176: What does doing nothing actually cost your team? More than you think.. Cutting team support, coaching, and training to save money is one of the most expensive decisions a business owner or leader can make. Lia breaks down the real dollar cost of inaction through two case studies and hard stats on turnover, wasted hours, and lost revenue. This episode is essential for any founder, team lead, or manager who keeps kicking team problems down the road.
- Ep 142: What would happen if you managed your team like a pro sports team?. Treating your team like a professional sports team means paying for top talent, fully utilizing every player, and investing in coaching as a non-negotiable. Lia walks through three lessons from pro sports that directly raise performance, reduce turnover, and build a team that can win when it counts. This episode is especially useful for founders and corporate leaders who keep wondering why results are not improving year over year.
- Ep 130: Why investing in your team is the real secret to scaling your business. Scaling a business comes down to one thing: treating your people as people first, not employees. Brittany Driscoll, CEO and co-founder of Squeeze, shares how she used that principle (along with documented systems and values-driven culture) to build a nationwide massage franchise from the ground up. This episode is essential for any owner or founder trying to grow without losing the culture that made their business worth scaling.
Want to go deeper?
The Ops Playbook. Systems and SOPs for teams that need to scale without breaking.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Lia (00:00): This afternoon I went into Lenscrafters to get my prescription updated. I went, this afternoon I went into Lenscrafters to get my glasses prescription updated. And when I walked in, there was a bunch of people in there and the person at the front said, hey, it’s really busy right now, it’s gonna be a while. And I said, okay, well, like a few minutes or an hour, like what are we working with here? And said, there’s a lot of people in front of you. And I said, okay, well, should I make an appointment to come back later? And he said, it’s really busy, might be, yeah, it might be 30, 45 minutes.
And I said, okay, well, I’ll just come back later, maybe tomorrow. So I walked out the door and I thought, gosh, this is a really bad customer experience. I mean, come on. Like I understand it’s busy, but this is a place where, you know, folks are coming in and out. You have a lot of choice, right? There’s a lot of places you can get your glasses, including online without talking to a person. And it’s like, it was pretty jarring, the whole experience. And I thought about how many other…
pretty rough customer service experiences we’re facing right now. And you know, this is a role where people maybe aren’t getting paid that much and they’re not really an incentive for being nice maybe or not. And it’s a real struggle that business owners have right now. And Lenscraft, okay, that’s a big corporation, but I know it is happening to a lot of us listening, especially my listeners that work in hospitality or have any sort of customer facing roles.
that you’re wrestling with, how do I get my team members to care and to show up and to be positive and to be nice and to be welcoming because they’re the face of our brand. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today on the show is how do we, I wouldn’t say get people to because we know that we can’t force people to care if they don’t care, but what tools do we have at our disposal to inspire people to show up in a better way. So that’s what we’re talking about today on
Well, when we think about it, you what’s going wrong here? So I already said it, we are probably paying people pretty close to minimum wage or like a lowish hourly rate. We don’t have an incentive for being more positive or doing a better job. We’re strapped for cash. We have a lot of roles. This person at the front desk, there’s not a ton of kind of like complexity in their role. So we feel like, yeah, like somebody, it’s fine. I can just kind of get whoever to do it.
We don’t really talk about a career path to that person because they’re just at the front desk or answering the phones. Like we don’t really know yet. We can’t make any promises or you know, it’s not, we don’t think maybe that person’s even interested in that. So we have someone that’s showing up. They’re doing the bare bones of the job. seeing, you know, they’re seeing clients or talking to people or filing tickets or whatever they’re doing. But they aren’t doing it in the way that we kind of need them to be doing it. So what do we do?
And again, I observed this firsthand at Lenscrafters, but I’ve seen it the same in businesses big and small. And I know what is a lot of challenges a lot of us are wrestling with is like, you know, I don’t really have a lot of levers at my disposal. I can’t just, you know, pay someone more because they were smiling that day or, you know, it’s not a commission kind of environment. So what do I do? How can we have a better experience here?
And there’s actually quite a few tools that we have at our disposal. So I wanna empower you that this is something that we can do something about. I don’t think we need to say, some people just aren’t gonna care and that’s too bad and whatever, and start to sort of like resign ourselves to the fact that like, there’s nothing you can do about it. I think when it comes to your team, there’s always something you can do about it. And I would start here, but if it’s a really rampant problem in your team, I would encourage you to reach out because it’s not a one size fits all.
But these are really, really good place to start. First and foremost, this comes into play the expectations around behavior, how you’re showing up at the front, your attitude, your dress code, the time you get to work, the number of patients or clients or customers you see in a day, all of these things actually, we start in the onboarding process, in the expectation setting, maybe even before, maybe in the interviewing process, we talk about,
Let’s say it was lens or you’re running an optical, you know, like a lens crafters small business, right? Something like where people can get an eye exam and purchase glasses from. And you are competing against lens crafters or four eyes or if one of these big, big names that, know, it’s people do have a lot of choice and they may be able to get something for cheaper. What you have to differentiate yourself will be that customer service experience.
clients that are listening that work in that own med spas. There is a, I live in County, there’s a lot of med spas out here. There’s probably like hundred med spas in Marin County. If you’re listening from Arizona or LA or Miami, New York, there’s a lot of med spas. There’s a lot of competition. So one of the ways you differentiate yourself from the beginning is how the folks at the front desk show up for people.
Are they welcoming? Are they friendly? Do they make you feel like, ⁓ we know who you are. We are excited for you to come in, right? That whole thing that I just talked about, those are expectations you set with that employee of how to show up from the beginning. Because when people come and they start to just figure it out themselves and they get into these patterns or they get into these habits and we don’t say anything until it’s gotten really, really bad, now we’ve got a lot of things to have to fix. And we just talked about this last week of kind of, now we have the laundry list that we’ve got to be dealing with.
Okay? Clients that, ⁓ sorry, listeners that are coming from corporate. Maybe you’re working in, know, you have a sales team or customer service or you’re dealing with people that are kind of trying to close deals, like whatever that looks like. The people that are on that receiving end, they are the literal front lines between you and your competition. It doesn’t matter what kind of industry you’re in.
The way that people are showing up and interacting with your customers is extremely important. And listeners who don’t have customer facing roles, so like when I worked in Big Tech, I didn’t have customer facing roles, I was working internally. This translates to the way your team members show up to each other, to partner teams, to people that they’re trying to collaborate with. Right, so we’ve got to think about this in a bigger way, is how our teams are showing up, and if they demonstrate like a I don’t care attitude, or I’m just gonna do the bare minimum.
that starts to degrade your whole team. And that starts at the beginning with onboarding, with talking about how we operate as a team, how we wanna approach our clients and our customers. There’s these expectations that we set right at the beginning. So that’s the first set of work that we can do. And that is something that all of us have at our disposal. Setting expectations, building it into the onboarding process. Like I said, hopefully even earlier.
building it into the interviewing and saying, hey, we’re looking for someone who X, Y, Z, and can meet these different criteria. And a lot of that’s behavioral, not just that can do the job from a skillset that’s willing to show up in the way that really represents our brand best because people are buying into the brand experience more than there’s just the product these days. Like it doesn’t matter if you have a better product. That’s not enough anymore. People have so much choice. They need something to make them feel like they matter. Okay, because right now I’m thinking like, gosh,
I don’t wanna go back to Lenscrafters. I don’t know, right now I’m recording this, I was like, should I go after? I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to go back. Is it gonna be busy? I don’t know, if I call, is it gonna be like, are they gonna tell me? This is the kind of negotiation you do not want your clients and your customers to be having about your service. So expectation setting, and I would say folding that into onboarding and setting those expectations from day one so that these patterns do not build up, that is the first tool we have at our disposal.
But the next tool and maybe the harder one is the follow-up. And I know a lot of us listening are like, I don’t have time to follow up on every little expectation I’ve set. This is ridiculous. Who has that kind of time? And so you maybe don’t follow up on any of it. Or maybe you wait a long time before you’ve dealt with it. Because no, I cannot follow up on every single employee and every interaction with the clients and whatever. That’s not what we’re talking about. I’m talking about having follow-up.
baked into the way that you work. Not again, like waiting later to catch someone in it or have like a mystery shopper come in and expose all this stuff. No, I’m saying following up regularly on the expectations set on the whole. So you have, if you have customer service, maybe you have surveys in place. And if you have people that are supposed to be closing sales, maybe they were reporting on the progress they’re making. How many of this did you do?
This is literally why I have the snippets tool because your team members should be proactively reporting on the things they’re doing. It’s not about you chasing them down and them only doing it because you passed. Right, that’s why we ask on a weekly basis, hey, what did you get done? What were the wins and accomplishments? Where are you getting stuck? Where do you need help? And what are your priorities for next week? That tool, snippets, available at leagarvin.com slash snippets, free tool. This is what I’m talking about.
because that feeling of like, I can’t chase it all down. I can’t possibly chase every single little expectation down. That actually isn’t helpful even if you did have the time and were doing that. We want your team members to be following up proactively on their own. Like, hey, I know my customer service ⁓ feedback that I’ve gotten. I look at it and I am accountable to, I’ve gotten 4.9 out of five every week for the last six weeks. What if your team members reported to you?
on the answers to those surveys. What if you flip the script on that? What if they reported to you how many sales they closed in a week or how much revenue they brought in if they have visibility to that or whatever it looks like. So we follow up, but we don’t make it as you chasing every little thing. It’s you put a mechanism in place. Maybe it snippets. Maybe you already have a tracking system that’s working where folks can see, okay, here’s the thing I’m responsible for and I’m going to be reporting on that. Let’s say it’s
products sold or if you have a PR company, how many media placements you had, or if you have an events company, how we tracked budget to actuals, or if you’re software, how much code we published this week. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you want your team member to actually be owning, I did this and I know that, and I can report on that progress. That’s the follow-up. And then when someone is missing,
it or isn’t hitting the goals, that’s when there’s a feedback conversation. So you’re not having an every second when something’s happening or not. You’re saying, okay, we had, okay, you give them a week to they’re reporting on it. Well, we’re seeing a bit of a shift. Like, we’re not hitting these goals week of week. Now it’s a conversation on what are you doing to meet that? Now let’s say you have a team member that shows up and they’re like, I don’t know, nothing I can say about it. Like, I don’t know what to do differently. Sorry. And that’s the attitude and.
I see that attitude all the time, by the way. So I get it. feel you. I’m right there with you. When you get that attitude, like, yeah, I know. It’s just like hard out there. She’s like, sorry, I can’t really do anything about it. We don’t just go, okay, well, I guess this person’s not gonna care. We say, okay, well, you know, come back to me next week with a plan and you’ve got to be ready to maybe it is someone that there’s gonna be some sort of shift that’s made. Is there a, you know,
incentive that you may or may not be giving them right now based on that. I’m not saying this is like, I’ve decided to fire them. There’s a lot of factors we weigh in before we fire someone and firing someone often creates a lot of other challenges to work through, including having to rehire. It’s very expensive. I’m talking about if you’re like planning to try to resolve this here, saying, okay, you know, we having some sort of incentive in place for doing the job well.
Maybe that’s being able to have more leadership over what they’re doing. Maybe it’s a little bit more flexibility. Maybe it’s a, you know, there’s a half day thrown into the mix. Maybe it is a little bit of a raise. Maybe it’s some flexibility to work from home. Maybe it’s something, but thinking about when there’s a follow-up of like, hey, if you don’t do that thing over time, what is the fallout? There’s something, right? Maybe they can’t be running point on the next project.
Maybe there’s, you know, and if you come to a place where you say like, have no leverage, this person does not care and they’re doing a bad job, okay, then it’s a situation where you’ve got to look at, okay, when I typically open up a role or do I get a lot of candidates where I have some options? I have a little bit of a good set supply here or I’m in a situation where there’s not a lot of interest right now and I’m a little bit stuck.
You wanna be always working to a place where you have a lot of interest because you’re paying people well and you’re able to create an attractive position. But I get it. I like to support anybody that’s got the situation they’ve got. And if you have a situation where you’re really worried that it’s not gonna be easy to find someone and I can’t really do a lot here, then it’s more to figure out around how do we get some more skin in the game for that person. This doesn’t mean everyone’s gonna care as much as you do as a business owner.
But the follow-up piece still has to apply. And at the end of the day, people come to work for basically two reasons, maybe just one. They wanna get paid, they wanna be compensated. And I would say the second reason, which we do see more often than not, and I think you cannot underestimate, is they wanna be valued, they wanna be recognized. And so if you cannot quite incentivize folks more at the moment when…
everything is so expensive and I think that is really what people are looking for right now. How can you create a recognition and a culture of like kind of demonstrating appreciation for folks that’s showing them that they are getting something as they’re moving towards being compensated more? I have heard countless stories of leaders really investing into a team culture. Maybe it’s like, you know, something as simple as an employee of the month or recognition or giving folks a Starbucks gift card or
or having something that shows people I saw you, because that can be contagious in creating the behaviors you wanna see. Like if I go back to Lenscrafters and someone is so nice, like I’m gonna fill out that survey and I’m gonna say, yeah, this person was awesome. And if that store manager said, hey Joe, you got this great feedback, I wanna share it with everyone and let’s,
have like a team lunch like I’m not talking about doing the pizza parties, but like something where we showed we recognize when people do a better job. We recognize when people care. You’re gonna start to shift that culture. So I know this is a complex issue. I know there’s not a lot of levers that we have all of the time, but we’ve got to figure out what levers we have. We’ve got to be recognizing folks more. We’ve got to be setting expectations and we have to be following up because people do the things they can keep getting away with.
And I’m not saying that as a skeptical or like negative perspective. I’m saying it as people are tired and they’re exhausted and they maybe don’t love the job they’re doing. And so they maybe don’t want to go above and beyond. But we can set a standard of like, this is the standard and being polite to your customers and having a reasonable conversation or being, you know, friendly ⁓ in a customer service and actually offering a solution. That doesn’t have to be above and beyond. That can be the standard.
responding to emails within, know, by the end of the day or within the next day. Like these are not things that we need to act like are extra that we’re like having to go above and beyond around. These are basics of the job. But if a team member is going on weeks and months and however long and they’ve never done those things because we never said anything, then it’s kind of on us. We’ve got to roll back the tape, set the expectations, have that follow up, be talking about what happens when we don’t meet those goals.
That’s something to think about right on your end around what levers do I have and then bringing more recognition in? But they kind of go to they kind of go in that sequence if If we haven’t ever said expectations It’s actually hard to recognize because someone doesn’t really even know if it mattered that they went above and beyond or like how they went above and beyond When we have the expectations We’ve created a follow-up We talk about kind of the incentives there. We’re recognizing work
This is, again, these are tools that we have to hook people in more, to create conditions where they do care. It’s not making people care. I don’t believe that’s possible. But we can make it easier for them to care. And that’s gonna be so much more. And it’s a hard moment right now. Again, if this is like, get it, sort of, I know I need to do it, but I need help, reach out.
Again, this is a conversation I have with my clients every single day. It is a really tricky moment. Even with high performing teams, even if you’re crushing it on the revenue side, you may have an employer to your like, I just like, this is not the way I need someone to show up. This is where these shifts make such a difference. And we can design a plan that’s really specific to your business and the types of things you’ve tried before and the personalities and the goals. Like it all kind of comes together.
but these are places to start and I know that if you implement these three things, it’s gonna make a huge difference. All right, see you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I get my employees to actually care about customer service?
You can't force people to care, but you can create conditions that make it easier for them to care. Start by setting clear expectations from day one, ideally in the interview and onboarding process, about exactly how you expect team members to show up with customers. Then build in a follow-up system so people are regularly reporting on their own performance, not waiting for you to chase them. Finally, recognize the people who do it well. When people feel seen, that behavior becomes contagious across the team.
What should I do when a front desk employee has a bad attitude with customers?
First, check whether you ever clearly set the expectation in the first place. If weeks or months went by without any feedback, the pattern is partly on the missing system, not just the person. Go back, reset the standard, and create a way for that employee to report on their own customer feedback weekly. If the attitude persists after expectations are clear, have a direct conversation about what meeting those goals looks like and what happens if they keep missing them. Firing is a last resort because rehiring is expensive. Look for levers first, like recognition, flexibility, or a small incentive.
How do I hold my team accountable to customer service standards without micromanaging?
The key is flipping the script so team members report to you instead of you chasing them down. Put a mechanism in place, like a weekly check-in or a snippets tool, where each person shares wins, progress, and priorities. If you have customer satisfaction surveys, have your team member own and report on those scores themselves. When someone is consistently missing the mark, that weekly reporting creates a natural opening for a feedback conversation, so you're responding to a pattern rather than policing every single interaction.
What if I can't afford to pay employees more to improve their customer service?
Pay matters, but recognition is often just as powerful. People come to work to be compensated and to feel valued. If raising pay is not an option right now, invest in visible appreciation: call out great customer feedback in front of the team, give a small gift card, or create a simple recognition moment that shows the employee you saw what they did. When team members feel recognized for meeting the standard, that standard starts to feel worth meeting. You're not asking for above and beyond. You're making the baseline feel meaningful.
When should I set customer service expectations with a new hire?
Start before day one. Bring it up in the interview by describing the behaviors you need, not just the skills. Then reinforce it in onboarding so the new hire understands from the start how showing up for customers is core to the brand, not a nice-to-have. If you wait until a bad pattern has been going on for months, you are left managing a backlog of issues that are much harder to unwind. Setting the standard early means you never have to convince someone to change a habit they did not know was a problem.